Before Oculus became what it stands for today and way before HTC-Vive or Samsung and Sony designed their VR headsets, Toshiba was chasing the virtual reality platform and trying to create a market for enterprise applications. If you are complaining today about the size or the weight of the new headsets, this Toshiba headset image below will definitely give you a sense of comfort. The first look of this headset was available in 2006. Interesting media coverage for the story can be seen here.

Not sure whether this model came with complementary passes to your local chiropractor but it was a good start and a precursor to our attempts of seeing 360 videos. One would think that in the last 10 years, the headmounted displays have atleast decreased in size by x 10 times which is really encouraging

What is more important is that Toshiba had a vision and an aspiration to chase the nascent market place. In fact in 1998, Toshiba Europe was already beginning to dabble with virtual reality. Their idea was to let the entire rendering happen at the client’s computer, implying some detail and quality have to be sacrificed given the then prevalent computers. This is basically how Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML, pronounce vermal) or its less known sister Viscape works. QuickTime VR is a commonly used technology that operates this way. It takes a full 360-degree photographic panorama, wraps this around the user, and enables the user to experience the panorama.

TOSHIBA was one of the first companies to help market sustainability by using Virtual Reality as a platform to market its electric bus. They developed an electric bus that was instrumental in reducing fuel cost and carbon emissions. The electric bus could then also be used as an emergency power source in times of disaster. Pretty cool marketing use of VR.

Lately, the company has been in the press for wrong reasons. Just as VR based hardware and content is beginning to emerge, Toshiba has run into some major scandals that will impact any VR aspirations that it has been harboring. This morning, Investors dumped shares in Japan’s Toshiba Corp on Friday, as closure on the company’s $1.3 billion accounting scandal appeared further out of reach after new revelations of losses at its U.S. nuclear unit Westinghouse. Toshiba has said it inflated its profits by about 155 billion yen ($1.26 billion) over roughly seven years. An independent accounting probe said in July that the company suffered from dysfunctions in governance and a culture of discouraging employees from questioning their superiors. Perhaps a VR based simulation of corporate ethics training should be made a stringent requirement.

If it took us 10 years to reduce the headset size and improve VR experience from the huge Toshiba headset in 2006 to recently announced SGear VR, Imagine what the next 10 years will bring us!